A Novel Compact Tri-Band Antenna Design for WiMAX, WLAN and Bluetooth Applications

Abstract: A novel and compact tri-band planar antenna for 2.4/5.2/5.8-GHz wireless local area network (WLAN), 2.3/3.5/5.5GHz Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and Bluetooth applications is proposed and studied in this paper. The antenna comprises of a L-shaped element which is coupled with a ground shorted parasitic resonator to generate three resonant modes for tri-band operation. The L-shaped element which is placed on top of the substrate is fed by a 50$\Omega$ microstrip feed line and is responsible for the generation of a wide band at 5.5 GHz. The parasitic resonator is placed on the other side of the substrate and is directly connected to the ground plane. The presence of the parasitic resonator gives rise to two additional resonant bands at 2.3 GHz and 3.5 GHz. Thus, together the two elements generate three resonant bands to cover WLAN, WiMAX and Bluetooth bands of operation. A thorough parametric study has been performed on the antenna and it has been found that the three bands can be tuned by varying certain dimensions of the antenna. Hence, the same design can be used for frequencies in adjacent bands as well with minor changes in its dimensions. Important antenna parameters such as return loss, radiation pattern and peak gains in the operating bands have been studied in detail to prove that the proposed design is a promising candidate for the aforementioned wireless technologies.